


Gaol Fever

by feroxargentea



Category: Master and Commander - All Media Types
Genre: Age of Sail, Gen, Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-09
Packaged: 2018-03-06 12:47:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3135026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feroxargentea/pseuds/feroxargentea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack Aubrey is hurt. Stephen Maturin is of some comfort.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gaol Fever

**Author's Note:**

  * For [esteven](https://archiveofourown.org/users/esteven/gifts).



> Written for Esteven, for the Doldrums community.  
> With thanks to cj2017 for lightning beta.

 

 

It was by the merest chance that they had escaped at all. The _Euterpe_ ’s crew had been much reduced by the gaol fever, true, and her dog-watch lookouts inadequate; but if it had not been for that rogue palm-trunk battering at her stern in the spring-tide currents, Jack and Stephen could never have scrambled unnoticed from the starboard boomkin, much less made the shore, some two cables’ lengths from the ship as she swung at single anchor.

Two cables, such a trivial distance: little more than a biscuit-toss for any ship caught on a lee shore in the face of a biting gale, yet so far to swim in the murk of a Caribbean new moon.

Settling back against the bark of their hideaway, Jack closes his eyes and resolves to rest as he has been commanded, but in the dark of his mind he can still see Stephen’s flailing labouring strokes, so pitifully slow; still hear the wheezing breaths hoarse across the viscid water. Jack’s limbs are weighted, his shirt billowing, swirling, impeding his every movement as he turns and strikes back for Stephen, seizing his outstretched hand, trying to haul him shorewards. So slow, so heavy; and now the alarm is raised, the musket shots are ringing out from the _Euterpe_ ’s tops, slicing across the oily swell, and Stephen is floundering, gasping, “Jack, Jack...”, the land still two hundred yards away, two hundred yards to safety...

“Jack? Hush, Jack, hush.”

He struggles back up to wakefulness. Stephen is crouched by the great tree’s buttress roots, shaking him gently by the shoulder. He feels Stephen’s fingertips touch his forehead, and he pulls away irritably.

“You will not be doctored, I find,” Stephen says, wiping his fingers on the filthy remains of his shirt. He unwinds the cloth and shakes a dozen misshapen fruit from its folds.

“I am well enough.” Jack feels a bead of moisture run down to his collarbone and seep into the sweat-dark hair that lies tangled there. He tries to smile. “It is nothing, only the heat. The heat and the goddamned humidity.”

Stephen eyes him with that familiar pinched, knowing expression, but makes no reply as he unwraps the yellowed bindings from Jack’s feet and bends to the suppurating lesions there. Jack does not need to look for himself. Every last shard of the sea anemone spines that pierced his soles in his desperate clamber to safety has been extracted, but he can feel the wounds festering, feel them throb and ooze. This damnable climate, he thinks: the sweating heat, the unrelenting rains, the flies that cluster around his eyes and mouth and foetid bandages whenever Stephen is not there to flick them away.

“How many days has it been now, do you know?” he asks, his low voice rough and unfamiliar in his throat. There would be small likelihood of being overheard even at a shout, he knows, earshot being a matter of feet in this clotted jungle with its constant drumming of raindrops, and the French—few as they are—having long since abandoned their searches and retreated to the shoreline, but he cannot take any unnecessary risk, however slight. He would likely be shot, were they discovered, and Stephen would be shot; and Stephen at least may yet live.

Stephen looks up from his dressings. “How many days? Five since we ran, or perhaps I should say swam. Sixteen, I believe, since our poor _Epimetheus_ was captured, though I cannot positively assert as much, so much of my time on the _Euterpe_ having been spent in the foul dank stinking airless hole they were pleased to call their sickbay.” He wraps strips of rinsed linen around Jack’s feet, pulling them tight, ignoring Jack’s sharp inhalation. “Tell me now, my dear, should our crew—God willing—have retaken our ship, when do you suppose one might reasonably expect her return?”

The confidence on his face is all but unbearable, and Jack looks away a moment, feigning calculation. Reasonably, he knows, the return of the _Epimetheus_ is not a thing one may ever expect. Were it his own dear _Surprise_ , indeed, he might share Stephen’s touching faith in her men, might assume—with reason, even—that the meagre prize crew that was all the _Euterpe_ could muster might be overcome and the ship retaken long before it could reach European waters. The Epimetheuses are a poor set, however, and so many of them sick beyond hope, and he had so little time as caretaker-captain to form them, so little time to raise their spirits to a fight. Even with Bonden, Killick, Davies and Doudle amongst them, the thing must be considered improbable at best; and then to suppose they will beat up for weeks against the ceaseless trade winds, will return to this out-of-the-way island, its longitude marked differently on every chart, and all this with never an officer to lead the navigation: none of this may be termed reasonable. And none of this, of course, may be repeated to Stephen.

“Why is it that you ask? Have we not food enough to hold out?” is all he says.

Stephen sniffs. “As to that, since I can hardly persuade you to consume sufficient to sustain a weaver’s brat, we might manage indefinitely, and all the more so once the _Euterpe_ sets sail. This blessed isle abounds in wild pigs, of which I trust I may conceivably contrive to entrap some in suitable excavations; I have been observing their habits, their iterations, for the purpose. And if I cannot catch them, why, that which nourishes a pig may also nourish a man, particularly a man bred since his earliest youth to the naval diet.”

It is a fling, a deliberate fling, and must be answered. Jack manages a grimace: adequate response, it seems, for Stephen grins back at him.

“No, we shall not starve, soul. Dissolve away in this ceaseless precipitation, perhaps, but starve, no.” He fidgets with the makeshift canopy that Jack rigged up some days previously between the buttress roots and frowns abstractedly at the water dripping between its layers of overlapped foliage. “Some sort of _Ficus_ , I make no doubt,” he says, “though nondescript and insufficiently magnifolious for the purpose. A fig for it, Jack. As soon as the French have set sail, I shall bring palm fronds from the strand and attempt a proper thatch, if indeed the wretched tub has surviving crewmen enough to set her sails at all.”

Jack nods, but his eyelids are heavy and the thread of conversation is beginning to twist and elude him. He feels fingertips touching his forehead again and a rough cloth wiping the perspiration away. He gives in to what he cannot fight, and he sleeps.

***

The daylight is stronger when he wakes again, and the rain seems to be ceasing, for a wonder. He cannot tell if it is an hour that has passed or a day; he thinks for a moment to ask, but has not the energy for futile questions.

Stephen is there, however, wigless but cheerful, and Jack watches the rivulets sliding down his neck from his sodden hair, leaving paler tracks on the grubby skin. The doctor is crouched down, cutting into one of his stashed fruits with his lancet.

“A flavour not dissimilar to limes, and likely antiscorbutic,” he remarks, offering a piece to Jack and shaking his head at the refusal. He squeezes its juice into a coconut shell of rainwater and holds it to Jack’s lips. “Drink, my dear. Let us not be compounding your afflictions with scurvy, for all love.” He tips the shell and then sets it back down with a sigh. “Assuredly you could tell me better, Jack, could you manage the journey to the sea-cliff, but I believe the _Euterpe_ to be making ready for sea. Perhaps she may sail on this evening’s tide, once her people have disposed of their dead: another three sailcloth bundles there were laid out this morning, God have mercy on them all.”

“Poor devils,” Jack says absently. He is thinking of his own ship’s fever-dead, two or three every week since they left England, and of the score of bodies thrown from the blood-soaked decks after his surrender to the _Euterpe_.

“Poor devils indeed. They had never a sign of the gaol fever on their own vessel before they took us aboard, did you know that, Jack? _Dona ferentes_ : it was to our clothes, our persons, that the miasma must have been clinging.”

Jack heaves himself onto an elbow with the impetus of provocation. “You say that as if we went willingly, as if we was not prisoners, Stephen! We might have hung out a plague-flag, I grant you, but they would only have taken it for a ruse-de-guerre.”

“Oh, _la guerre_ , _la guerre_. Forgive me, Jack, I do not make any claim to know your business. Had I known my own better, I should have detected the contagion amongst our pressed men, should have refused all of that pitiful fleabitten draft from the Hereford gaols and sent them back to that pestiferous receiving ship with a supplementary flea in the ear of the press-gang’s captain, so I should.”

“None of this can be laid at your door, brother,” Jack says, and he knows it to be true for once. Stephen is an unlucky wight at sea, and no sailor, and if they make it back to England they will both—as the sole surviving officers of the _Epimetheus_ —be court-martialled for her loss, but it is Jack for whom the case will be no formality. He can expect dismissal, perhaps, or at best to be cast on the beach for the remainder of his career.

Back to England: it must be midwinter there, he realises, the snow lying deep on the frozen hills. How strange it is that he can remember the cold but not truly imagine it. “But we must get home,” he says aloud, “if only to inform poor Scuton and Younge’s families of their passing. Were they buried ashore, do you know, Stephen?”

“I believe not. I have observed the _Euterpe_ ’s cutter to make several voyages into the bay in the last few days, presumably to dispose of their own people in the deeper water, and your unfortunate lieutenants doubtless along with them. My conscience pricks me, I confess, to have left the Frenchman’s crew with no surgeon at all, not even a loblolly-boy to dispense what few nostrums he might scrape together.”

“But we had given no parole! It was their decision entirely to permit you your liberty, their incompetence to leave me guarded by a single sick marine, and we broke no word when we ran. Though indeed,” Jack goes on hastily, sensing himself to be blundering, “it would be natural for a physician to feel an obligation beyond a mere formal promise. Natural, commendable—”

“Commendable fiddlesticks,” Stephen retorts. “There was little enough I could do for them in any case, their own surgeon’s stores being lamentably short and half-adulterated, God rest him. And there is precious little I can do for you, either, soul, save to press sustenance upon you: and that one service you will not even allow me.”

It is a neat trap, neatly sprung, and Jack nods in rueful recognition. “Very well,” he says. “A mouthful, if it will salve your poor conscience.” He accepts a morsel of the pulped fruit and succeeds in swallowing it. The taste is pure acerbity, crabapples in too-early summer, comfortingly medicinal.

Stephen glances at the remaining pulp, evidently considering and relinquishing the possibility of forcing more upon his patient. “Rest now, Jack,” he says.

Jack lets his head fall to the damp, yielding leaf-litter. “Are you away to hunt the wild boars, then, Stephen?”

“No, no.” Stephen stretches his arms until the joints crackle and then curls into the remaining space between the great tree’s roots. “No, they will keep. Rest, will you now, Jack? I shall be here when you wake.”

Jack sighs and lets his eyes close. He lets the currents take him, lets himself drift back to the bitter, beloved chill of home.

 

 


End file.
